Estimating the acoustic reverberation of an environment is essential for capturing acoustic signals such as speech in a reverberating environment such as for example a room in a building.
When a sound is emitted and then captured by a microphone in a reverberating environment, the microphone captures not only the signal received directly, but also signals reverberating in the environment.
This reverberation is reflected by the impulse response of the environment, from which emerges various known parameters, in particular the reverberation time. The impulse response is directly measurable by emitting an acoustic impulse in the environment, but this method is burdensome and hard to imagine for making repeated measurements while one or more speakers talk in the room.
The reverberation time can be estimated blind, for example while one or more speakers talk. The most commonly used parameter for representing the reverberation time is the reverberation time at 60 dB RT60.
As an example, the document US 2014/169,575 describes a method for blind estimation of reverberation time in a room.
However, the reverberation time is not representative of the distance between the emitter and the microphone, which however has a significant impact on the reverberation level. The captured acoustic signals can therefore not be satisfactorily processed with the known methods of the aforementioned type.